Paris (and Cannes) in the Spring, Through Woody Allen’s Eyes

From left, Michael Sheen, Rachel McAdams, Woody Allen, Owen Wilson and Lea Seydoux on the red carpet during the opening night of the Cannes Film Festival.Credit
Francois Mori/Associated Press

CANNES, France — He’s taken Manhattan, and once again Woody Allen took Cannes, if not by storm, then with a light flurry of soggy jokes, a soupçon of charm and a couple of movie stars in tow. His latest, “Midnight in Paris,” the opening-night attraction of the 64th Cannes Film Festival here — his 11th movie at this event — isn’t a re-return to form, a revitalization along the lines of his 2005 entry, “Match Point.” But it gave the swarming festivalgoers, locals, journalists and paparazzi a lingering look at a movie legend who waved from high atop the red carpet trod by giants of cinema and the festival’s notorious fashion police.

Those fashion cops mean business: I couldn’t even enter a black-tie dinner in a beach tent because I was wearing (nice!) red sneakers. Cannes is in the glamour racket and keeping up beautiful appearances is one way it remains the pre-eminent event. (It opened on Wednesday and closes on May 22.) Other festivals manage to snare important premieres, with Venice giving Cannes some competition lately. Still others, like the all-encompassing Toronto, present more selections. Yet Cannes retains its allure, with premieres from some of the most important international auteurs and a star platform that functions as the European equivalent to the Academy Awards. Mr. Allen may sit out the Oscars but he puts in face- and red-carpet time at Cannes.

Certainly the subject of “Midnight in Paris” made it festival-ready. An appealing Owen Wilson stars as Gil, a Hollywood writer with literary aspirations who, while in Paris with his fiancée (Rachel McAdams, flailing in the role of a shrew), revels in an earlier age. Transported, magically or imaginatively, this Cinderfella meets, or perhaps doesn’t, greats like Salvador Dalí (Adrien Brody) and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), encounters that promise much and deliver less, partly because Mr. Allen seems disinclined to write characters as smart as he is. Marion Cotillard, Michael Sheen and Carla Bruni (a k a Mrs. Nicolas Sarkozy) show up, as do the Eiffel Tower and every other touristic hot spot in Frommer’s.

Photo

Tilda Swinton in "We Need to Talk About Kevin."Credit
Nicole Rivelli/Independent Production

At the news conference for “Midnight in Paris” someone asked Mr. Allen whether these postcard clichés were his vision of Paris or those of his main characters. “I learned about Paris the same way that all Americans do, from the movies,” Mr. Allen answered. He then suggested that, like the protagonist in Gil’s novel, he is also in the nostalgia business, adding: “That’s the same New York City that I’ve shown to people around the world in a picture like ‘Manhattan.’ It’s the Manhattan that I don’t see around me but the one that I recognize from movies. And this is the same thing in Paris. I wanted to show the city emotionally, the way I felt about it. It didn’t matter to me how real it was or what it reflected.”

It was an unreality that the audience at the first press screening rewarded with generous applause. It’s too bad the Australian writer-turned-director Julia Leigh wasn’t equally sanctified with “Sleeping Beauty,” her accomplished feature debut, which was greeted with desultory clapping and a smattering of boos. A story of sex and death that evokes the work of the French author Georges Bataille (“ Story of the Eye”), it concerns a lovely, lonely young student, Lucy (a strong Emily Browning), who, over the course of the movie abandons the degradations of one kind of job for another, by becoming a sex worker of a rarefied type: drugged into a deep slumber, she lies with old men whose impotence she can’t witness.

Ms. Leigh is one of four female directors with films in competition this year (out of a slate of 20), an improvement given last year’s all-male lineup. The most high-profile member of this select sisterhood, the well-regarded Scottish filmmaker Lynne Ramsay (“Morvern Callar”), is back with a long-awaited third feature, “We Need to Talk About Kevin.” Based on the novel of the same title by Lionel Shriver, this immaculately produced, claustrophobic and unpersuasive drama turns on the shell-shocked mother (Tilda Swinton) of a 15-year-old bad seed who sprouts into a cartoon psycho. Ms. Ramsay sabotages her refined visual style with the bluntness of her storytelling, washing the screen with red and turning Kevin into a demon child of near-parodic proportions.

One higher-profile selection out of competition is Gus Van Sant’s “Restless,” a love story about a mortally ill waif, Annabel (Mia Wasikowska), and a morbid orphan, Enoch (Henry Hopper, a near ringer for his father, Dennis), haunted by death. Although he has the cinematographer Harris Savides on his side, Mr. Van Sant has a lot to overcome, including a sometimes treacly, tonally uncertain screenplay by Jason Lew and a soundtrack that too often distractingly evokes Carl Orff’s “Musica Poetica,” famously used in Terrence Malick’s “Badlands.” This is the most mainstream feature that Mr. Van Sant has done since “Finding Forrester,” even if its eccentric flourishes and deep feeling are unmistakably his own.

Still to come are the Danish director Lars Von Trier, who is back in competition with “Melancholia,” as are Pedro Almodóvar (“The Skin I Live In”) and the brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (“The Kid With the Bike”). Johnny Depp is also here again, this time with “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” directed by Rob Marshall and, more important, featuring a treasure trove of photo opportunities in Penélope Cruz, Geoffrey Rush, Gemma Ward, Judi Dench and the original pirate himself, Keith Richards. But even a Rolling Stone hasn’t generated the excitement that Mr. Malick has, whose feverishly anticipated film “The Tree of Life” has its first official press screening on Monday at 8:30 a.m., Cannes time. Stay tuned.

A version of this article appears in print on May 13, 2011, on Page C6 of the New York edition with the headline: Paris (and Cannes) in the Spring, Through Woody Allen’s Eyes. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe